THE INTERNET IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK IT IS

A professor of history and philosophy of science casts a stony eye on the liberatory promises of the internet.

When most people talk about the internet, they’re really talking about the tiny slice that is social media. It’s a “reverse synecdoche, the larger containing term standing for the smaller contained term,” writes Smith by way of introduction to his central argument. These social media, he argues, are fundamentally enemies of human liberty. Employing that reverse synecdoche, he shows how the internet “has distorted our nature and fettered us” by, among other things, turning users into addicts (in the strictest terms) and serving as a surveillance device that often limits our political freedoms. We are bent by our technology, unable to concentrate on reading and no longer remembering anything without Google’s help. Of course, as Smith points out, this is a charge leveled against previous information technologies. When Gutenberg printed the Bible, people could simply read it rather than having to memorize it, which many critics at the time considered to be a diminution of human intelligence. Smith is not quite so doctrinaire about print, but he makes a good case that the computer of Gottfried Leibniz’s dreams more than 300 years ago was not the personality-shaping machine of today. Leibniz imagined something whose workings, in modern terms, “can be performed without ‘strong AI,’ without any internal life or experience of all the calculative operation it performs.” Leibniz further held that human thought is an instrument of excellence, whereas those who shape algorithms today seem not to think much about human thought (or excellence) at all. The best parts of this thoughtful book-length essay link those algorithms to the “gamification of social reality,” of which a strong example is the down-the-rabbit-hole entity called QAnon.

A worthy critique of a technology in need of rethinking—and human control that seeks to free and not enchain.